


A Terrible Pirate

by sheafrotherdon



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-04-21
Updated: 2007-04-21
Packaged: 2017-10-11 23:23:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/118297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco Malfoy is the runaway heir to a fortune and Bill Weasley is a pirate.  Swashbuclking ensues.  Thank you to Dogeared for the invaluable beta! ~4000 words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Terrible Pirate

"You're a terrible pirate," spat the newest captive to set foot on the good ship _Gryffindoria_.

The words were almost lost beneath the sharp snap of sails filling with wind and the crash of surf against the ship's hull. Yet Blackguard Bill, Terror of the High Seas, Scourge of His Majesty's Navy and Eldest Weasley seemed to have heard well enough and turned to eye his prisoner with amusement. "You reckon?"

"I'm a _botanist_ , you oaf," protested the prisoner. "I like _plants_. And you kidnap me while letting Admiral St. John Smith get away? Do you know how much money that drunken old sot keeps inside the false heel of his shoe?"

Bill sauntered across the deck, smirking his satisfaction. "Yeah, but he's not nearly so mouthy a little bugger as you. Maybe I wanted a bit of entertainment rather than a handful of silver." He grinned, showing off his gold tooth. "What's your name?"

The young man squared his shoulders. "Malfoy."

Bill nodded, winking. "And you reckon I didn't know that before I had someone grab your bony barnacle of an arse off the dock?"

Malfoy narrowed his eyes and sighed. "Oh how original. A kidnapping for ransom. Because no one's ever tried _that_ before."

Bill shrugged, pulling a knife from his belt to clean under his nails. "Well, you're a fair way placed to earn me an income," he offered. "Way I hear it, your father's got big plans for you. Marriage to Lady Pansy Parkinson . . ."

Malfoy made a face.

"Job in the merchant division of Lloyds. Just as a diversion, course. Wouldn't want the our lords and masters getting their hands too dirty."

Malfoy stared him down implacably.

"And then you had to go foul it all up by – what was it he did, now, Longbottom?"

A young, round-faced deck hand tugged at his forelock. "Stowed away, Cap'n."

"That's it!" Bill snapped his fingers and pointed at Malfoy with delight. "Stowed away. Did a runner in the dead of night, disappeared at Portsmouth, and blow me if anyone's heard from him since . . ."

Malfoy yawned.

"So you see, Master Malfoy, I think you misunderstand my intent." Bill idly rolled his knife across his knuckles. "I'm not so much in the business of kidnapping as I am in the business of . . . repatriation."

Understanding dawned. "You _wouldn't_ ," Malfoy breathed.

Bill smirked. "Wouldn't I?" He shoved his knife back into his belt. "I'd say that'd depend on whether you get on my good side, wouldn't you?"

Malfoy was left with little to do but seethe.

*****

Being a pirate had rather less to do with general mayhem and pillaging and more to do with swabbing than Malfoy had imagined.

"I cleaned the deck not an _hour_ ago," he pointed out to Fletcher, an odious little peg-legged man who possessed an uncanny ability to smell like rotting cabbage.

Fletcher grinned, showing a mostly toothless smile. "Aye. But the Cap'n says . . . "

Malfoy rolled his eyes. "Captain captain captain," he muttered, grabbing the pail of salt water out of Fletcher's hand and sloshing it deliberately over the old bastard's one good shoe.

"Is there a problem, Mr. Fletcher?" asked someone in smooth, imperious tones.

Draco looked heavenward and begged the good Lord for deliverance. Bill Weasley was one thing, but his brother Percy, ship's Purser and general fastidious pain in the behind, was another.

"Young Mas'r Malfoy here, he's not so sure t'deck needs one more swab, like," Fletcher offered.

The Purser pushed his glasses a little further up his nose. "Mr. Malfoy, need I remind you of the various and sundry germs that can collect on a ship's deck, given the particular quality of the algae in these waters, or the temperature of the sun?"

Draco glared at him sullenly. "I rather think if your concern is germs, Weasley, you should prevent your crewmen from relieving themselves on the deck like tomcats marking their territory. Or is their aim so _very_ bad as to make them unable to empty their bladders into, oh – " he gestured " – the _ocean_?"

The Purser's mouth grew thin and displeased, rather as if he'd sucked on his half share of a lemon too early in the day. "In a nasty swell, Mr. Malfoy, it's quite impossible to – "

Draco rolled his eyes. "Oh please. And if your concern is cleanliness, do something about Finnegan's britches, for heaven's sake. Given a magnifying glass, I'm reasonably certain I could find the cure for dropsy lurking in the creases of his practically-sentient trousers."

The Purser tilted his chin aloft and addressed the Dread Crewman Fletcher. "See that Mr. Malfoy pays particularly attention to the crow's nest, Mundungus. And ask Finnegan to wash his damn breeches before the Captain decides the only remedy is to throw him overboard again."

"Aye, sir," Fletcher said, shuffling in some second-rate approximation of a bow as the Purser sauntered away. "Up you go, chit."

Draco blinked, nonplussed. "Up where?"

Fletcher gestured to the crow's nest at the top of the highest mast. "Awful trouble with seagull crap in our top'uns," he grinned. "Best get cracking."

Draco sneered derisively. "Your mother is a pox-ridden strumpet of the haystacks, Fletcher."

"Aye, that she is," Fletcher said happily. "I'll give her your regards."

*****

The crow's nest was a seething cesspool of bird droppings, but not an entirely unpleasant place to be by Draco's reckoning. At least up top there were no idiot crewmen to trip in retaliation for looking at him indolently, no hard-tack to nibble on at the risk of his extremely pretty teeth, and no Weasleys to bother him with their general, irritating Weasleyness.

"Hey up," said Bill, poking his head over the crow's nest.

Draco shrieked in dismay and bounced his scrubbing brush off Bill's forehead. "You imbecile!" he snapped.

Bill hitched a shoulder, grinning. "Just checkin' on my cargo."

Draco peered over the edge of the crow's nest and saw that Bill was hanging onto the rigging with just one hand and foot. "You're terribly cock sure," he said bitterly. "Don't you fear falling to an awful, salty death?"

"Nah," Bill said, vaulting somehow into the small space Draco occupied. "Born on a ship. Riggin's as good as solid ground to my sort."

"And what sort is that?" Draco asked. "The profoundly _stupid_ sort?"

"The born at sea, sort. Keep up, Malfoy. I'll start reckonin' on you being slow at this rate."

Draco wrinkled his nose. "I'll have you know I was top of my class at Eton, in every subject save – " He set his shoulders. "Dance."

Bill leaned on the edge of the crow's nest. "You took dance?"

"All young gentlemen were instructed in the art of – "

"No wonder you fuckin' ran away."

Draco blinked. "Well." He cleared his throat. "Quite."

"So you lit out, decided on being a botanist, eh?"

"Something to that effect." Draco retrieved his scrubbing brush from beside his feet. "I would rather use my intellect for something worthwhile than squander it on . . ."

"Financially raping the British public by personally twistin' the crown's tax policies and screwing over Parliament? With a nice side of hiking up rents and turfing out tenants, course."

Draco flushed. "My father is – "

"A wanker," Bill finished.

"And you're a _pirate_ ," Draco said scornfully.

"Yep. But I'm not a wanker," Bill said cheerfully. "In anything but the literal sense."

Draco winced. "That is far more information than I needed to know about your relations of the flesh, Weasley."

Bill smirked in an utterly infuriating fashion. "So how's it faring, being a prisoner on a pirate ship?"

Draco gestured rather rudely with his scrubbing brush. "I'm being forced to do manual labour," he said derisively. "I have eaten salted pork and fear I'm becoming _accustomed_ to the smell of twenty-four seamen crammed together in the lower decks. There are absolutely no plants anywhere to be seen – and no, tobacco doesn't count, especially when it's destined to be stuffed into the far reaches of Fletcher's cavernous craw – and no one has done anything remotely debonair, manly or swashbuckling. I feel quite let down."

"We've some pillaging penciled in for later in the week," Bill said archly.

"You're just saying that so as not to appear the worst pirate ever," Draco shot back. "I don't think you even know which direction we're traveling."

Bill laughed, amused. "I know exactly where I'm headed, young scrubber Malfoy. A small nook for the ocean's unwanted sorts, not so far from Jamaica, where I reckon on hearing if my gold's come in."

"Gold?" Draco asked.

"For you," Bill said blandly. "Repatriation money and the like."

"I thought you said you thought my father was a wanker," Draco retorted, trying to cover how very much he was bound and determined to find a means of escape before his father's goons could lay a hand upon him.

"Oh, he is that," Bill nodded. "But he's a rich wanker, and I do enjoy making rich wankers a lot less rich." He grinned happily. "You could say it's a point of professional pride."

"You're a feckless and shiftless criminal sort," Draco offered, but there was no real heat in it.

"Aye," Bill nodded, and leapt over the side of the crow's nest, landing neatly with his feet in the rigging.

"And the most frightful show off," Draco added disparagingly.

"Aren't I though?" Bill said, pleased, grabbed a spare rope and slid nimbly back to the deck. Draco peered over and wondered if he could actually spit into his hair, but decided if the wind didn't blow his saliva off course, his mother would surely kill him on hearing of what he'd done. Of all the ways Draco had imagined meeting his maker, death by maternal chastisement was right at the bottom of a severely unpleasant list.

*****

It turned out Bill hadn't been lying. On Thursday morning everyone seemed extremely agitated, and Draco's swabbing duties were swapped out for the general hauling of cannonballs. At lunch time he was given an extra serving of tack, and Thomas handed him a bandana.

"Excuse me?" Draco said, eyeing it with distaste. It had a certain air of _couture de goinfre_ about it, not to mention a stain that defied easy contemplation.

"Wear it," Thomas said.

"Wear it _where_ , exactly?" Draco asked.

Thomas fixed him with a completely unamused gaze. "On your head, round your neck, like I fucking care. You can't pillage without a bandana. It's against union rules."

"You have a _union_?" Draco asked weakly.

"You try getting lime benefits and enough fresh drinking water without one," Thomas offered, and dropped the bandana on the table before walking away.

It was impossible to be sure, the below-decks lacking a mirror or any other reliably reflective surface, but Draco felt that after only twenty or twenty-five minutes of bandana wrangling he'd fashioned it into an appropriately jaunty neck accessory. He climbed up the rickety wooden stairs to the main deck and found master-at-arms Black putting everyone through their paces. He hated Black.

"MALFOY," Black roared.

Yes, he really hated Black. "You bellowed in the manner of a laboring sow?" Draco asked.

"HA! Bloody varmint, I should – oooh you just wait 'til we – YES. Here!" He thrust a large wooden stick into Draco's hand. "Anyone from the other ship comes near you, hit 'em with that!"

Draco looked from the stick in his hands to Black's face and back again. "You want me to beat people with a stick."

"YES! Bloody brilliant sticks are," Black said, nodding, twirling a moustache Draco didn't feel would be wholly out of place at the wharf in Tortola where all the trollops sold their wares. "THOMAS! If you don't have extra bullets in your pocket I don't even KNOW what to do with you."

Draco cleared his throat.

"You're still here!" Black said.

"Well, yes, since there's a great deal of water around the ship making escape rather futile, and I haven't a blessed clue where my stick-fighting position should be," Draco offered.

"Anywhere you like!" Black crowed. "But don't get near the cannons, they'll whip back and kneecap you, BAM, like that."

"Yes, yes, may I ask a question, your Rabid Insanitus?"

"RABID! Funny boy," Black said, looking earnest. "Fire away."

"I believe you're anticipating resistance to the pillaging plan," Draco observed. "Hence the weapons."

"BRIGHT BOY. By God, Eton's not completely fucked, then."

"And yet you've given me a _stick_ ," Draco pointed out. "Which I cannot imagine is a terribly useful defense against, say, musket fire."

Black nodded. "True, true."

Draco waited. "So," he said, when it was clear Black planned to say nothing else. "Why not give me something _useful_? Say a gun. Or a sword. Perhaps a knife?"

"HA!" Sirius shouted, laughing with delight. "DO I LOOK MAD TO YOU, BOY?"

"Yes, actually," Draco replied.

"BRIGHT BOY! TWO points to Eton, TWO."

"So – stick or nothing, is that what you're saying?"

"Stick! You can never go wrong with a Stick!" Black offered, and turned on his heel to clip Longbottom up the back of the head and call him a turd before gamboling over to a pile of cannonballs and touching them lovingly.

Draco stared at his back for a long time before Bill sauntered up, hands folded behind his back. "Bloody good master-at-arms, eh?" he remarked.

Draco peered up at him. "Are you all completely barmy? Is it genetic, or a product of prolonged exposure to salt?"

Bill smirked. "Maybe you should find out."

"Yes, yes, of course, if I survive today's pillaging with my stick here – " Draco waved it "- I'll sign right up."

Bill licked his lips and grinned. "Excellent," he smiled, and wandered off to patrol the prow, keeping an eye out for their quarry.

*****

By nightfall, Draco had beaten three people over the head with his stick, only one of whom had been a crewman on the _Gryffindoria_ , and earned his very first black eye.

"Oh my, very bruised, very bruised indeed," tutted Dumbledore, a bumbling old fool who was apparently ship's surgeon. He liked to sing sea ditties in a trembling falsetto while mopping up blood, and there were bells tied in his beard. Draco had the oddest urge to feed him peppermints.

"Will he be pretty again by Jamaica?" Bill asked, leaning over Dumbledore's shoulder. A jagged cut ran from Bill's left temple to his ear, and his hair had come loose from its usual queue.

Draco didn't find this attractive in the least. "Pretty?" he said, with as much withering disdain as he had in him after two hours and twenty-seven minutes of pillage support.

"Doubt your dad'll want you back damaged," Bill observed, grinning, his gold tooth flashing in the candlelight.

Draco wondered if he could run into a mast or two for the next several days and ensure he was too damaged to return to his father. Of course that would mean staying upon the _Gryffindoria_ until he could find reputable work as a botanist again, and the idea of rubbing shoulders with a rag tag bunch of misfits and curs, was . . . huh. He blinked. Not entirely unappealing now he'd indulged his base criminality. He looked up at Bill. "Fuck off," he said pleasantly.

Bill chuckled, pleased, and flipped Draco a doubloon. "Nice mouth," he observed, and as he wandered off to check on Diggory's broken leg, Draco wondered if he meant that in more way than one.

*****

By the time they drew close to their disreputable destination, just beyond the prying eyes of His Majesty's Royal Navy, Draco was an experienced hand at pillaging, having had three more opportunities to ply his beating trade with Stick, dodged two bullets (that he knew of), and gained another black eye and a dislocated thumb. He got up especially early the morning before they were due to make dock and found Bill already pacing the decks, eyeing the east, where a foul looking bank of cloud was half-obscuring the sun.

"That can't be good," Draco mused, standing beside him.

"Storm," Bill said tersely.

"No, _really_ ," Draco replied. "And here I thought it looked like such a jolly little bank of frost."

Bill turned his head, and there was no amusement in his face. "Bad storm," he said simply. "Go below, rouse the crew. We'll need all hands."

"Oh," Draco said, the gravity of the situation sinking in. "Oh."

"Yeah," Bill said.

"I'll – " And Draco wasn't sure what the protocol was for showing agreement and willingness to do all he could, but he awkwardly patted Bill's impressively muscled arm before scurrying below to do as he was asked.

By noon the world was dark and the sea had transformed itself into an expression of deepest anger, throwing off benevolence to seethe and crash, trying its best to tear the _Gryffindoria_ apart. Draco did what he could – which wasn't much save stay out of the way of those crewmen who knew what they were doing – and kept an eye on Bill yelling commands into the storm, hands firm on the ship's wheel, riding into the wind.

When the main mast splintered, Draco was wholly unsurprised. When the ship pitched and groaned, tipping toward the ink-black ocean, Draco rolled his eyes at being forced to live a cliché. When he was swept out to sea by a vicious breaker, he could only think that even this was better than working for his dad. And then everything faded into fighting for his life and clinging to rum barrels and he couldn't really think of anything at all for a good long while.

*****

"Wake up," Bill said far too close to Draco's ear. "Come on y'big fucking faker, you've made your point."

"Oh do be _quiet_ ," Draco moaned. "You're so blasted _rude_."

"Ha," Bill mumbled. "Come on, open your eyes you daft bloody bastard."

Draco did with a put-upon sigh and stared up into a stretch of brilliant blue, bordered by the fronds of palms. "Urk?" he managed, baffled.

Bill's face came into view. "There you go. Nice to see you, Malfoy."

Draco blinked. "I never thought St. Peter would look quite so much like a pirate," he said, puzzled. "Or God. Or Gabriel. Or perhaps you're a lower cherub. Unless, of course, I went to hell."

Bill raised an eyebrow. "You lived, you hardy git," he pointed out, helping Draco to sit up. "Welcome to your first shipwreck."

"First?" Draco asked, poking at his own head to check it was all there. "You imagine there'll be more?"

"Occupational hazard," Bill said.

"Of botany? I hardly think so."

"Of _piracy_ ," Bill corrected.

Draco opened his mouth to protest, but then thought better of it. He was good with a stick and didn't swab so much these days. Perhaps in time he could graduate to swords. "Alright then," he nodded. "Pirate."

Bill grinned. "See, Malfoy? I knew you had it in you."

"You did?" Draco asked incredulously.

"Yep. Snatched your bony arse up because you looked the type."

Draco frowned in disbelief. "I hardly think I – "

Which is when Bill kissed him with a fierce gentleness that tasted of salt and sweat and burned out Draco's protests more effectively than the New Orleans witchcraft that frequently melted young men's brains. Draco felt his hands move as though of their own volition to wind themselves in Bill's red hair, to pull him closer and steal some adventure from willing lips, to borrow a little mischief in order to press close, to kiss back, and to drown in heat. "Wait," Draco said as the kiss broke and he tried to remember the mechanics of breathing. "You mean this was – you were _courting_ me?"

Bill snorted. "For an Eton bloke you're damn slow on the uptake."

Draco blinked again and poked Bill in the arm. "You're the worst boyfriend ever," he said.

"Best see if I can't make it up to you then," Bill grinned, and pulled out a banana from his pocket. "Breakfast?"

Draco took it gingerly. "Well. I suppose it's better than being clapped in irons."

"That's what my _last_ boyfriend said," Bill huffed, and Draco was forced to drag him down into the sand and shut him up quite thoroughly with teeth and tongue.


End file.
